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KingSkippus writes "At midnight Pacific on Saturday, December 1, NCsoft shut down the City of Heroes servers for the final time. Since announcing the closure, a group of players has been working hard to revive the game by getting attention from the gaming press, recognition from celebrities such as Sean Astin, Neil Gaiman, and Felicia Day, and assistance from fantasy author Mercedes Lackey. Meanwhile, NCsoft has been drawing negative publicity, including a scathing article about the shutdown from local news site The Korea Times, noting that the game was earning $2.76 million per quarter and that 'it is hard to comprehend what NCsoft means when they say they closed it for strategic reasons.' NCsoft's stock price has fallen over 43% since the announcement in August, almost 30% below its previous 52-week low, right when investors were counting on the success of the recently launched Guild Wars 2 to help boost the company."

I wouldnt say most. Most bad ones yes, but good ones have that have active player bases usually survive for a long time. I played FFXI for years before giving it up and even with the release of FFXIV they smartly did NOT kill the FFXI servers which turned out to be a good thing considering how poorly the newer game was received.

This is the elephant in the living room of western capitalism that is seldom discussed. A corporation makes a reasonable profit doing what it was founded to do, employees are happy with their work and their pay, and customers are satisfied with the nature, quality and price of what they are buying. There are no signs of impending collapse, for internal or external reasons. And yet, it all gets torn down in search of higher rate of return, or a more profitable quarter, or bigger bonuses for a handful of executives.

The other elephant in the room is that this strategy very often bites you in the ass very badly. The vast majority of corporations, like the one I work for, doesn't do such stupid things because the boss/owner is in the business for the long term.

One of our competitors dropped a lot of smaller facilities in one state they serviced because they weren't making the return they wanted. We snatched up as many of those contracts as we could. How did that bite our competitor you may ask? Because now we had a sizable market share in that state. Sure it was with the small facilities, but looking at a map it looked impressive. Soon word spread to the larger facilities about our services. When the contracts came up for renewal at the larger facilities, we had credibility, a good reputation to back us up, and a map showing the sizable coverage area we had. Our competition started to lose some of the larger, much more profitable facilities because they didn't maintain their less profitable ones.

In the past, people made money off company stock through dividends. Under a gold standard, inflationary credit expansion was difficult and limited, any artificial credit expansion was cut short by people demanding payment in gold and the resulting recessions, required to clean up the errors made during the artificial boom, were relatively mild. The only way to make money was by long term investment in plant and equipment, to increase production and lower costs, and then pay out the company profits in dividends to shareholders.

Today, under a government monopoly of fiat currency, the best way to "make" money is to get cheap credit from the central bank, or the large banks who have special favor with the central bank, and slosh it back and forth in the market. Whoever gets the new fiat money first benefits because they get to buy before that inflation has trickled into the economy and caused all prices to rise. That "sloshing" is why we see some prices rise more than others and at different times.

Of course, sloshing around printed fiat currency doesn't make society more wealthy, It makes a select few richer by stealing the existing wealth from the poor and middle class via inflation.

Now, not the kind you're thinking. It was profitable. It wasn't as profitable as their core properties - but NCSoft basically has the WoW of Korea in Lineage. Comparing it to that is a bit harsh. The thing is, that's not what NCSoft is thinking.

They're thinking "We're the big shots. We can do this. In America. We just need the right subject matter."

See, never forget - Korea's VERY nationalist. Insanely so. Up there with China and Japan. You can't even depict a samurai in Korea (The origins of "Arthur the Katana-wielding Knight for Soul Calibur"). And so is NCSoft. They see themselves as representing Korea. So they came to export Korea to the US in the form of Lineage 2 and Aion.

Both of which did horribly. They failed, because we didn't want Korean Grindfest-style MMOs. We don't play 80% of our games in a net cafe (They do there). We are, a different market. And they needed to keep making up excuses as to why their Korean division wasn't dominating in America...and why City of Heroes was still alive when their 'theories' said it should be dead.

The answer, in the end, is that City of Heroes was a constant reminder of the failure of their corporate culture. They they were wrong. And in Asia, being wrong is worse then taking a minor loss - their idea is, essentially, that 'social harmony' (Read: Less drama in the office) is worth some unprofitable practices.

Like shutting down that embarassing American-grown MMO that's just a tiny bit of your bottom line, because you're also packing the WoW of Korea. Having it dead is the point right now. When they bought CoH, they saw it as a launchpad for their American business - now that they've failed to launch, it's time to remove any evidence of this foray to begin with.

An... interesting post, but I really must ask, where are you getting this information? Articles? Insider information? To be frank, the notion that a business would cut something profitable simply because they didn't accurately analyze their foreign market is somewhat difficult to accept automatically.

Since you know where the information is, it'd help if you just shared a link instead of making me repeat your efforts. I'll read any links anyone posts here, but I'm not going go out of my way to look for evidence of something that I consider outlandish and unlikely.

Hey I'm a westerner and I liked L2 (and to a lesser extent, Aion). Played L2 for a good 6+ years. Aion just for a year or two (didn't like the lack of interesting economy and bind-on-equip items).

The thing that attracted me to Lineage II is that unlike many Western MMOs (cough, WoW), it doesn't hold your hand. The economy is player driven (most items are player-crafted instead of dropped, somewhat like EvE Online). PvP is open - anyone can attack anyone provided you aren't in town (...but there are conseque

This is just another perfect example of "company doesn't listen to customers, company gets boned" which we have seen play out again and again and again. if it wasn't making a profit, or costing more in dev time that it was raking in? Then sure I could see pulling the plug, but its obvious that they yanked it to try to "force" more customers onto their "new hotness" and it blew up in their face.

Why is hobbyist such a hard word for people to spell? Perhaps it has to do with the elimination of the letter "Y" from our language. Hamburger patty is now hamburger pattie on 98% of all menus I see. A sign of the apocalypse, no doubt.

Like most F2P games they had an item shop for buying character slots, buffs, customization choices, story arcs etc. I think that's where most of the income for these games comes from these days with even the subscribers having an incentive to speed over and above their subscription.

I suspect that City of Heroes was seeing diminishing returns from their story expansions. The user base had come to expect big new events a couple of times a year but they were likely making less of a return on each one.

I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.

It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.

This could even extend to players or clans being able to physically purchase land and set permissions on who could build on or alter that area. Perhaps a particular clan would buy narrow strips of land running between settlements, and build roads or train tracks on that land (which the game mechanics would allow you to do, and which would permit much faster travel than walking). Others might become traders (since there's no NPC shops). Others might even offer secure storage facilities to players that had too much stuff to store in their personal inventory (i.e. they'd build some big, tough structure out of very-hard-to-destroy materials, allow people to put boxes inside with their stuff... the game would have to support some 'locked box' permissions system to ensure that the building owner couldn't just steal everyone's stuff etc.)

Would be quite interesting to see which people tried founding cities and trade hubs, and failed, and which succeeded. And why did they succeed? Could they offer people in that area better security than in other areas? Was the area closer to transport or resources?

Anyway yeah, just a thought. I would totally play that kind of game...sounds awesome. I love sandboxey stuff (and don't like most conventional MMOs that are story/quest driven and prohibit you from doing certain things).

The funny part is how many different places people put that 'death'. Some put it at the introduction of Tram. Others at Publish 16 which reined in the tamers and bards. Others at Age of Shadows which transformed it into an item based game...

These MMOs are ultimately operating a service. Expecting them to operate it indefinitely is a bit naive.

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it? If it's a matter of getting it off the books and getting it off the executive radar, then spin it off into its own business as a wholly owned subsidiary. There are a lot of alternatives that don't amount to throwing a revenue stream in the garbage.

Thanks to GE and their CEO's like Jack Welch US CEO's have been led to believe that if you aren't making 20% on it you should shut it down. This is the reason many successful and profitable business have been shut down or sold to the Chinese, because it was not making "enough" money. In most cases we'll never get those jobs back.

So blame GE and their former and current management for this view that MBA's now hold.

I'm not entirely sure this is an MBA oriented issue -- NCSoft, though global, is a South Korean company. It would be difficult to accurately infer a cash growth-based motive for dropping it. It could be technical, or artistic reasons, or the big one -- the people capable of growing the game in terms of interesting play, simply weren't there. Perhaps they retired, left the company, or are being vectored off to GuildWars.

I stopped playing Everquest when I became aware it was a Sony product. Because of their corporate practices, their support of RIAA and their proclivity toward suing their customers, I would not play it if the game lined my pockets with real gold. Sony taking ownership of any game I play is a switchable offense.

As bad as Sony was and is, Verant was even worse when I played EQ. Patches would arrive with zero warning and completely change a class or some other aspect of the game. No notes, no warning, and often no logic behind changes that was apparent. Sony was actually an improvement on things. Admittedly it was early in the world of MMOs so things were less polished but it was very frustrating.

As for shutting down COH when it was a viable game, its beyond me what their thinking must have been. The game was playab

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it?

Well, the submission was quite obviously from a fanboy - and leave out much more than it includes.Among the key facts that it leaves out is this - the number of players has been steadily declining for years. It may currently be bringing in more than spends, but that's not a situation that's going to last indefinitely. The curves some players published shortly after

These MMOs are ultimately operating a service. Expecting them to operate it indefinitely is a bit naive.

That said, it sounds like NCsoft's shutdown was premature. If a service brings in more revenue than it spends, why not keep running it? If it's a matter of getting it off the books and getting it off the executive radar, then spin it off into its own business as a wholly owned subsidiary. There are a lot of alternatives that don't amount to throwing a revenue stream in the garbage.

Yeah, I expect them to operate indefinitely actually. They are basically are running a service attached to a database that a client connects to. This should basically have an operating cost of keeping a server plugged in, which isn't much. If there are enough shards operating that it requires dedicated administration, then there is going to be enough income to support it. Unless the code was VERY poorly written, the only way that you aren't going to make a profit by keeping it plugged in is through manage

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Which is why a casual gamer like me looks at a game with an on-line component and says "I'll pass".

I'm too old and lame to feel like getting my ass handed to me by a 12 year old, so any form of online play for me is a negative instead of a positive.

I want to be able to pop a game in the console, and play. I don't want to care if they have decided to shut down the server, or if they have some terrible DRM which requires me to be connected to the internet. If your game can't work on a console which has no internet connection, I am not interested in your product.

This sounds like one of those situations in which someone published a decently successful game, and then decided to leave the players out in the cold as they move onto other things. I suspect an awful lot of people will look at subsequent NCsoft titles and wonder if it will be playable in a few years.

It was RIDICULOUSLY casual-friendly. And it was widely acknowledged that PVP in the game was a half-hearted attempt at best. Far FAR more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements, where you don't have to worry about competing with "A. Random Kid" on the internet. Just play how you want to. Team when you want to. Do whatever you want in the game. No competition unless YOU desire it.

As a five year resident of the City - no, it really wasn't. There was considerable grind, and unless you wanted to play only a limited handful of the available archetypes that could solo well... you pretty much had to play on a team. And after the release of the Mission Architect and the game transforming into the City of Farmers... that could be difficult, even on Freedom. (By far the most populated server.) When the Incarnate system launched, along with the raid ba

As a five year resident of the City - no, it really wasn't. There was considerable grind, and unless you wanted to play only a limited handful of the available archetypes that could solo well... you pretty much had to play on a team. And after the release of the Mission Architect and the game transforming into the City of Farmers... that could be difficult, even on Freedom. (By far the most populated server.) When the Incarnate system launched, along with the raid based WoW style endgame, life was pretty much over for the casual player.

Far FAR more development time went into PVE and MAJOR QOL improvements

True, mostly. QOL improvement lagged greatly as the dev team was wedded to an iron schedule and consistently committed to new shiny over polishing the dulled and older bits.

8 year resident here, up to the last day. Not sure how long ago that 5 years was, but COH of late had been very not-grindy in nature (YMMV, of course). Issue 24 (the one in beta when the axe fell) had a TON of QoL changes and additions coming, including solo Incarnate play. Ever since Matt Miller took over as Lead Designer the game had become VERY casual player friendly.

8 year resident here, up to the last day. Not sure how long ago that 5 years was, but COH of late had been very not-grindy in nature (YMMV, of course)

From five years ago until closing day, and while the lower level grind pretty was much cleared up after Posi and War Witch took the reins - the 30/35+ grind remained. (Remember the old saw "welcome to level 40, you're halfway there"?) And yet more grind (for Incarnate experience) came in after Issue 22.

Exactly. I play a couple MMO's. In fact I let my XBL subscription lapse as I found that I could have more fun playing some of the Free-2-Play games and spending $20 a month on in game currency or a subscription to get stuff rather than spending $60 every few weeks for a new XBox game that usually I got tired of in a few days.

But I don't expect it to last forever. I view it as no different than going to a movie or to a bar both of which I'd spend $20 or more every time I go rather than $20 a month for pro

This is true, we always knew that the game would shut down at some point. However...

The MMO genre of game is especially conducive to getting people to invest enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into the product. The average City of Heroes launch day veteran has probably spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on this game, many much more. And many have spent thousands of hours playing--not just mashing buttons, but coming up with creative stories, even contributing to user-generated content areas such as the Mission Architect system that allowed players to create their own custom enemies, contacts, mission objectives, dialog, etc. In other words, what NCsoft doesn't realize is that at this point, we have just as much stake in the game as they do (some would argue more), yet they hold the ultimate authority to unilaterally declare, "Okay, game over, we're going to destroy years of your effort and a large monetary investment." Not because the game wasn't making money--it was--but because they're undergoing a corporate "realignment" [pcgamer.com].

Not only that, but in the process, they laid off over 80 employees at Paragon Studios, the Mountain View, California development studio that built and maintained City of Heroes. Before the shutdown announcement, a group of employees and investors tried to acquire the IP from NCsoft to keep the game running, but NCsoft wouldn't sell it. After the shutdown announcement, thanks to the SaveCoH movement, another attempt was made, but again, NCsoft wouldn't play ball, even releasing a statement that they had "exhausted all options" in trying to sell the game. Excuse me? Exhausted all options? They hold the IP. Now that the shutdown has come and gone and the community has largely dispersed, practically speaking, it's worth zero. It's impossible for them to have "exausted all options" unless and until the ink is dried on the page transferring the game and its IP to another company or organization that can run it.

Not only that, but this isn't the first time that NCsoft has done this. This is the fifth game in as many years. Auto Assault. Exteel. Dungeon Runners. Tabula Rasa. Now City of Heroes. Clearly to me, the company is an MMO killer. The players of City of Heroes aren't the first group of people to have their hard work and investment destroyed, and apparently, NCsoft doesn't really care very much that it's systematically destroying communities and the output of people's creative expression. As a gamer, why the hell would I ever want to buy a game like Guild Wars 2 or any of NCsoft's other games? Answer: I wouldn't, and they won't be seeing any money from me again.

So does NCsoft have the legal right to shut down City of Heroes, lay off everyone at Paragon Studios, and carry on as if nothing happened even though the company's own investor relations statements indicate that the game was steadily profitable and it had the overwhelming support of its development staff and management? Sure, no one is disputing that. However, I do firmly believe that NCsoft, and MMO game companies in particular, have an ethical obligation to do everything they can to plan for a game's sunset ahead of time and be willing to release the game property to another company or third-party organization willing to take over running it if one is willing to (which, in this case, there were multiple parties interested in doing so). To not do so shows an immense amount of disrespect for your customers, and you run the risk of generating the negative publicity and outcry such as the one NCsoft is facing right now.

Sadly, too many MMO companies just don't understand the value of community.

Yeah. That was one of the great things about Paragon Studios. They DID understand the value. These guys went out of their way to make sure we knew how much they understood and appreciated the community.

So they laid off 80 people on a game that was bringing in ~$2.5m in revenue every quarter, or ~$10m/year.

If those 80 people had an average total cost of just $125k (not hard to do once you figure in benefits, and software and California) then that is all of the revenue for CoH.

$2.73M profit a quarter, not income. That's after deducting all of the support and development costs. The profit from City of Heroes was something like 40% of NCSoft's North American profits, although it was only about 2-3% of the entire company's profits.

I'm not sure how shutting down CoH would have helped GW2 post launch. Especially since CoH was more or less run independently by Paragon Studios, who have no real connection to ArenaNet. The target audiences are even completely different. Lastly, since GW2 lacks a subscription, it would be difficult for one to take away from the other financially.

There you go, a distributed processing game where you run a client but also host a piece of the global server. That way the game processing scales with the user base and there's nobody to say "See ya" except perhaps the game master controlling the distributed services. Wonder how you would minimize the latency problems? Oh well, I'm no gamer, this is for those among you more heroic than I.

Or you could isolate trust dependent server components and put them on some cloud server for scalability sake, still offloading a significant amount of server's computational heavy lifting to the distributed network. Yes there is redundancy on the nodes, but you would keep the primary server lean, and that would minimize the cost of the environment per users.

There are so many ways to skin this cat, you just need bright babies and a desire. Make it open source so you get a lot of play, and once you have the

It's been fairly obvious since the initial announcement that a lot of people are interested in seeing City of Heroes continue, and going to extreme lengths to make it so. If NCsoft really does not, for whatever reason, want to continue to host it, than why not just pass it off to somebody else? I'm sure they could have sold off the servers to somebody and at least gotten some salvage value. Hell, they could have brokered a deal were whoever they sell it to still charges a fee to play, which NCsoft gets a percentage of.
It's just boggling to me that there is very obvious money to be made, yet a company seems to have no interest in making it.

Did you ever actually USE the "Paragon Market"? That was not developed by Paragon. It was developed by ncsoft (or someone else they hired). And it was spectacularly bad; like, I don't think I know anyone who does web development who couldn't probably do a better job in a day. Literally. Not hyperbole, not exaggerating. It was below the level of what you'd get if you went through a standard Rails tutorial.

So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. An

So what happens if they sell it to someone competent? It does better. And ncsoft loses face.

NCSoft has lost face already. Their stock value has been sliding since the day of the Unity rally on the Virtue server, and their stock sank another 7.8% after the release of the Korea Times article questioning the business acumen of shuttering the game in the first place.

Without access to the reasoning behind the decision, I have no way to be sure why they decided to close the game -- particularly with it making a profit of about $2.75M a quarter -- but I believe that it was done to conceal the fact that they were already demonstrating their incompetence. NCSoft has brought to the Western market a number of MMOs rooted in the style of the games that are their bread and butter in the Asian market, with a heavy emphasis on grinding for rare drops, patronage of the in-game store, and PvP. That these games kept doing poorly and getting closed (Aion having shown "disappointing performance" in the last quarter), while City of Heroes -- almost the antithesis of the Korean style of MMORPG -- kept making a steady profit created the appearance of NCSoft not being able/willing to understand the Western market at a time when they were making an effort to become a major online gaming provider. With the ugly counterexample gone, NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.

Same goes for Japanese developers...they just don't "get" the American market these days. In the old days, on consoles anyway, they didn't have fair competition, Nintendo and Sega obviously showing favor to fellow Japanese companies.

Now...they actually have to compete with top of the line formerly PC centric US and EU dev houses and they just can't do it.

Look at Sqaresoft/Square-Enix and FFXI, it came out after the lessons that could be learned from SCEA's EQOA (done by American team) and they still got it

> NCSoft could rationalize that they just needed to find the right subject, rather than a different playstyle, to make an MMO popular in the Western market.

I disagree. Part of the problem is that NCSoft has traditionally had shitty UI design and implementation along with some bone-headed game design principles. (i.e. The retarded Shaman's Rookery jumping puzzle in Guild Wars 2 http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shamans_Rookery [guildwars2.com] )

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for the last few weeks and the UI is such an as

That's right. Players will be very encouraged to take up a new game, spends hundreds of hours building up characters, only to have everything throw away in a few years when the next big game comes out. It's sort of the opposite of building brand loyalty.

The company is trying to move players over to another game. The whole point is not to let players keep playing this game, so they'll look for a new one.

When Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa shut down, players were offered free time in some of NCSoft's other games. No such offer was made to the City of Heroes playerbase. Although, frankly, given the stink we raised about the shutdown, I'm not really surprised that they didn't extend such an offer, although it wouldn't have been very practical -- Aion is "Completely Free", so we could already have just moved over to that game, Blade and Soul wasn't out yet to move players to, and the Lineage and Guild Wars MMOs

You can't shut down your cash cow just because you're banking on your shiny new toy. What if the new toy flops? If SE had shut down FFXI prior to the diasastrous launch of FFXIV 1.0, the company would have gone bankrupt. All that time, the revenue from XI kept them afloat.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

You can't shut down your cash cow just because you're banking on your shiny new toy. What if the new toy flops? If SE had shut down FFXI prior to the diasastrous launch of FFXIV 1.0, the company would have gone bankrupt. All that time, the revenue from XI kept them afloat.

CoH was not their cash cow, it made 2% of their revenues. I love how you make long arguments while knowing nothing of what you're talking about.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

Profit is hard to define or rather it can't be looked at in isolation. Killing CoH means NCSoft can leave the North American market, 98% of their revenue is in Korea. So they can shut down their US offices, data centers, marketing, get rid of Korean personnel with N. America knowledge, Korean managers dealing with N. America and so on. Lot's of secondary costs that can be lowered or gotten rid of totally. Just saving the time and hassle (late hours, mis-communication, flight costs, etc.) of communicating with the North American offices may be worth it. So even if CoH was profitable in isolation, once you add in all those other North America costs that get saved it may very well be a loss. Either way NCSoft clearly didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Killing CoH means NCSoft can leave the North American market, 98% of their revenue is in Korea. So they can shut down their US offices, data centers, marketing, get rid of Korean personnel with N. America knowledge, Korean managers dealing with N. America and so on. Lot's of secondary costs that can be lowered or gotten rid of totally. Just saving the time and hassle (late hours, mis-communication, flight costs, etc.) of communicating with the North American offices may be worth it. So even if CoH was profitable in isolation, once you add in all those other North America costs that get saved it may very well be a loss. Either way NCSoft clearly didn't want to deal with the hassle.

That's it exactly. But it still doesn't explain why they didn't sell the game to a company that would keep it running. That decision can only be described as short-sighted and evil.

Either way, I wouldn't trust any game NCSoft is running in America. They might close them down at the drop of a digital hat. Gamers outside of Korea should stay far, far away from anything NCSoft tries to sell.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for

There's risk and opportunity costs though.

Capital invested in it might be able to generate more profit doing something else. Large cash flows relative to profits make for a large risk if the income side of the stream drops for some reason and the costs reductions lag.

If CoH was bringing in profit, however small it was, then there was no good reason to shut it down, no matter what "strategy" they're trying to go for. You can't push players from one game to another - MMOs don't work like that. They'll play both or none at all, and neither game has little bearing on which one that is.

This is not an entirely true statement, unfortunately other events make it more muddy.

CoH cost $X and was bringing in $Y revenue for a profit $Z. If by applying those same $X dollars to Project K and generating $A revenue and $B profit, if $B > $Z it makes sense to close down CoH and invest in Project K.

Your logic only works in an environment where you have infinite resources and time. The real world has neither.

Many flaws in your reasoning, but I'll pick at just one: The Paragon Studio employees weren't retasked to other games. They were unceremoniously canned.

The *only* thing NCSoft gained by shutting down CoH was server space, which is pretty cheap. In return they lost a $2.75M/quarter revenue stream, a dozen or so experienced developers, and the goodwill of millions of gamers. (Hundreds of thousands of people who actually played, plus a lot of bad publicity.)

At a minimum, they could have sold the game to a company that would have kept it running. Then they could have retasked their servers while pocketing a big cash infusion and avoiding bad press. But they were too short-sighted to even do that.

What's the Korean word for 'clusterfuck'? That's the best explanation for this whole fiasco.

CoH is so old that the servers they're using to run it will probably be retired. They're probably quite specialized for the needs of the game and anything new is going to offer an order of magnitude better performance. They could probably reduce the support staff at this point, or have them support multiple games. The player base that's sticking around at this point probably aren't griping or reporting bugs that they know will never get fixed anymore and there's no reason that the existing staff can't be tr

Played it years ago. Loved it. It spoiled me for when I then went to see what WoW was all about. CoH was light years ahead of WoW in every aspect from character creation, to UI, to game play. Loved playing a healer in CoH. Tried one in WoW and absolutely hated it. Here's a hint Blizzard...the act of healing should NOT draw aggro.

As a player of CoH I've been watching this all unfold for months, and it's just sad on every level. Obviously sad for the players and developers, but there's a greek tragedy that is looming over NCSoft as well.

The 'strategic reasons' that caused NCSoft to shut down CoH is that they just don't understand the product -- an easy-to-play game friendly to casual players with little or no PvP content. That kind of thing doesn't sell in Korea and doesn't make sense to NCSoft's Korean masters. They have made a decision to consolidate their games along the Korean 'grind-and-PvP' model, possibly with a centralized game store using common currency, as some other large game producers have done. CoH could not be adapted to that model. Advertising in America would be additional cost for a marketing department that only understands Korean game culture. So they decided to effectively pull their games out of America and focus on what they know best back at home.

It's a strategy, I guess. They'll still sell games in America, but they'll be anglicized versions of Korean grindfests with little or no marketing. GW2 is a prime example...and the players there are beginning to understand that, with the GW1 gameplay replaced by ridiculous grinds and a 'pay to win' cash market, not to mention characters from the korean alphabet creeping into the American version of the UI.

Frankly I wouldn't trust NCSoft to keep any game alive in the Western market, not now and not for another year. They don't want to do business here. They don't want to make the kind of games that casual players enjoy. They want to have a stable full of Lineage clones, and cutting off a profitable CoH is the first step towards that strategic goal.

It's just a tragic display of hubris. They were even too short-sighted to consider selling the game. Just sad, all around. RIP, Paragon City. I'll remember you for letting me be a hero.

Yes, grandiose conspiracy theories are sad... especially when they fly in the face of facts.

The fact is, CoH was a minor portion of their revenue - and that portion and the revenue was steadily dropping as CoH's subscriber base continued it's long decline. It was a year or so, at most, from going negative, to no longer being profitable.

I believe that NCSoft's decision to retool to the Korean-only market came too late in the development cycle of GW2 to just cancel it. They're going to suck all they can out of that game then abandon it. I agree with you that Arenanet is in the same position as Paragon, and I sympathize with them.

The cash shop in GW2 allows purchase of gems, which translate to inventory space, bank space, character slots, and gold to buy anything you want in the in-game auction house. I don't know how you leveled so fast

When they canceled Firefly, it meant that I wouldn't get any new episodes.

This would be as if they canceled Firefly *and* made my existing DVDs stop working, so I can't even watch the old episodes any more.

And this is not just an MMO issue. This will happen to *every* DRM game, sooner or later. The entire games industry is no longer selling products, it's renting them, and the only reason people haven't realized it is that we're too soon in the process for it to really hit peop

City of Heroes 2. Same reason Bioware/EA went out of their way to get Galaxies taken down just before the release of The Old Republic: they want to create a demand for a certain type of game, then provide it soon after.

True that Sony maintained Galaxies and that Bioware/EA had no control over Galaxies BUT the previous person was right. SWG was shutdown specifically because of TOR. LucasArts owned the rights to both and didn't want SWG competiting with TOR.

The only problem with the CoH2 theory is that NCSoft always hated CoH, especially after the game went over with a resounding thud in the Korean market. They tried to add new grind mechanics to appeal to the Korean playerbase, but there just wasn't any traction.

City of Heroes 2. Same reason Bioware/EA went out of their way to get Galaxies taken down just before the release of The Old Republic: they want to create a demand for a certain type of game, then provide it soon after.

Nope. Matt Miller, the senior developer at NCSoft has repeatedly said that NCSoft shot down the idea of CoH2 numerous times.And, as the game sank like a stone in the asian market, it's doubtful that they were going to build sequel to it with another in-house studio.

CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.

CoH was NCSoft's only "western" MMO. Everything else is Korean grindfests and lots of expensive Free to Play games. That's one of the big reasons it was shut down, because they didn't want to maintain the second development staff, second set of offices, second server farm, etc... to keep the game running.

CoH was 5% of their revenue, I think 3%. It was never, ever, ncsoft's flagship product. They didn't even make it; they bought it from someone else. They saved it from being closed back in the day, and they made money on it, but it's never been their biggest game, or their most successful, or anything like that.

They never saved CoH from being closed. CoH was never in danger of closing. The development team split, with half of them going off to make (the inferior) Champions Online, but the game was always profitable. NCSoft swooped in and bought it because it was worth money, not to 'save' anything.

CoH was nothing like a 'flagship', though. If anything, Guild Wars 1 was their flagship product in America. On the other hand, CoH was a constant revenue stream unlike GW1.

flagship product? ummmm no. Just because something is profitable doesn't mean there are no good reasons to shut it down. It could be anything from hardware replacement costs were on the horizon to they think that allocating the resources from CoH to something else has the potential to make them a better return to they can see the writing on the wall with the dwindling population.

City of Heroes had a recurring monthly payment (just like WoW, Rift, Everquest I, or most non Free to Play MMOs). Guild Wars 2 has no additional recurring cost (and therefore recurring revenue) past the initial game purchase (though they have released expansions for GW1).

So it's entirely possible 100,000k City of Heroes subscribers would be more profitable than 400,000 Guild Wars 2 players when looked at a period of 4-6 months past launch.

City of Heroes went Free-to-Play months (maybe even a year) ago. F2P accounts were limited to number of characters and such (unlock more with micro-transactions). P2P accounts earned Vet rewards and and had much more unlocked.

Officially, NCSoft tried to sell it but failed - they released a statement on October 2 [ncsoft.com] saying that: "We’ve exhausted all options including the selling of the studio and the rights to the City of Heroes intellectual property, but in the end, efforts to do so were not successful." The #SaveCoH community is profoundly skeptical of this, to put it mildly.

Unofficially, various parties have reported that their attempts to contact NCSoft to discuss the possibility of a sale never got anywhere - their emails, phone calls and letters all went unanswered. Bottom line is, so far there's been no indication that NCSoft want to do anything other than kill off CoH completely. If they let it be known that they'd be willing to sell it for just a few million, there'd be several interested buyers, or at the very least a heavily promoted (and I suspect heavily supported) Kickstarter campaign running right now.